PHYLLOXERA, small, sap-eating, greenish insect of the genus
Phylloxera, closely related to the aphid . Phylloxeras feed on
leaves and roots, and many species produce galls on deciduous trees.
Their life cycle is complex; one species is known to pass through 21
different stages. Most notorious of the group is the grape phylloxera,
Phylloxera vitifoliae, native to E North America. The species has
winged and wingless generations, the former causing galls on grape
leaves and the latter feeding on the roots, causing nodules and
eventually killing the vine. The grape phylloxera came close to
destroying the wine industry of France after its accidental introduction
in about 1860; grafting of susceptible European vines onto resistant
North American root stock saved the European vineyards. Phylloxeras are
classified in the phylum Arthropoda , class Insecta, order Homoptera,
family Phylloxeridae.

PHYLLOXERA., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2004

Glug bug

Malcolm Gluck
on Christy Campbell's Phylloxera, a tale of the aphid that nearly destroyed
French vineyards

Saturday March 13, 2004The Guardian

Phylloxera: How
Wine Was Saved for the World
by Christy Campbell
256pp, HarperCollins, £17.99

This book really begins at chapter eight. It is here that the author, a former
defence correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, finally introduces the human
villain Monsieur Borty, in this tale of the microscopic aphid Phylloxera
vastatrix (the dry-leaf devastator). It was so termed by Jules-Emile Planchon,
the French botanist who identified the pest in the 1860s, but is now, in
scientific circles at least, labelled Dactylasphaera vitifoliae. Between 1860
and 1900, it was responsible for nearly wiping out all French vineyards, and
then infecting much of the rest of the world's.

It is not a topic, you might think, which could detain for long even those wine
nerds whose bedside tables groan with arcane publications devoted to the great
Medoc vintages or the influence of canopy management. Yet Christy Campbell's
story, expertly retailored, would make a compelling TV drama, as its portrait of
French and American viticulture and scientific agonising would make stunning
viewing. This is a detective story with a romantic, contemplative ending (just
what did great French wine taste like pre-Phylloxera? Will Phylloxera devastate
afresh?).

Borty was the wine merchant whose imported American vine cuttings, planted in
his Rhône vineyards in 1862, introduced Phylloxera to France, as the aphid lay
in the roots. If Borty is the unwitting Moriarty, then Professor Planchon (whose
writing style, from what I assume to be Campbell's translations of parts of the
botanist's many papers, is fluent and witty), is emphatically the Holmes.

Over this complex saga, rich with politicians, peasants, pests and prats, of an
incredible chapter in European ecological history, Campbell has indefatigable
biographic control. We read that the ministry of agriculture offered a fortune
in francs (by 1874 it stood at 300,000) to the discoverer of a cure for the
blight, and hundreds of ideas were conceived. None was any good (though
cannibalism, via a US bug called a tyroglyph, offered a brief glimpse of
deliverance only to fail to find its French-infested Phylloxera sister
appetising). The shower of amusing, idiotic, massively expensive and
prohibititively poisonous solutions was unending, for the reward was colossal:
not just the prize money, but seeing one's idea put to profitable use by tens of
thousands of wine growers. By 1884, 2.5m acres "of France's vineyards had been
destroyed" and 1.5m acres were in the grip of the parasite.

The answer, which our hero proposes, is found in the blight itself: since US
vines can live with Phylloxera, grafting on to US root stock is the only
solution (wide-spread chauvinism held that this would lead to the individual
tastes of hundreds of French wines being destroyed; but this is nonsense as it
is the grapes which provide the taste, the roots are merely a channel for
sustenance). Our hero is vindicated, though a certain Leo Laliman unsuccessfully
claims the prize.

By a series of prodigious grafting programmes, eventually Phylloxera is
eliminated (or, rather, brought under control, to the extent that it no longer
threatens annihilation, though sightings are sporadically reported everywhere
from New Zealand to Napa and, worryingly, new forms are emerging). Planchon gets
a statue (outside Montpellier railway station). The vignerons get back healthy
vines. The 300,000 francs sits "unawarded in the vaults of the Banque de
France".

Wine students, for whom this book would make a marvellous gift, may enjoy the
tale, as will all members of the trade who regularly deal with vignerons across
the Channel. All entomologists and amateur bug buffs must read it and whatever
any member of the nerdist colony earlier referred to may have to shift from his
dormitory pile in order to accommodate it, he should do so.

But just as sharks were just fish before Peter Benchley and then Steven
Spielberg came along, Phylloxera may yet be transformed into an insatiable alien
by the cunning of the film camera and Campbell's labours will at that point be
adequately recompensed for the great amount of close reading and detailed
writing he has accomplished in order to create this book.

Malcolm Gluck's Why Water Just Won't Do: Wine Matters is published by Little
Books.

When France
withered on the vine (Filed: 08/03/2004)

Christopher
Bland reviews Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the World by Christy Campbell

This is an
extraordinary story - a story of invasion, dogged French resistance hampered by
anti-American feeling, painstaking and lengthy scientific inquiry, bungling by
the French Ministry of Agriculture, and agrarian disaster on a massive scale.

The invader
arrived on the right bank of the Rhône in 1862 in a case of American vines
imported from New York by a Roquemaure wine-merchant, a Monsieur Borty. The
vines carried in their roots the dry-leaf devastator, phylloxera vastatrix, a
tiny yellow aphid which breeds with astonishing speed; a single female will
produce 25.6 billion descendants in eight months without any male assistance.

The imaginative
nephews of a French viticulturist described the insects "strolling along like
good bourgeois going into a restaurant with walking-sticks in their hands" - the
restaurant is the root of the vine, which the aphid pierces with its proboscis
and feeds on until the host is completely destroyed.

After a slow
start in the Midi, the disease spread from the French Alps to the Pyrenees.
Margaux and Pauillac were threatened. By 1884 one million hectares of French
vineyards had been destroyed, and a further 660,000 were dying. As the plague
spread, church bells were rung in alarm, anti-phylloxera syndicates were formed,
and a burn-or-perish approach was fitfully adopted.

The economic
consequences for the French countryside were dire. It took 40 years for wine
production to recover. French peasants abandoned their ruined vineyards and
headed for Algeria, Argentina, and Chile, taking their wine-making skills with
them. Consumption of Bordeaux plummeted; the officers' messes of smart regiments
switched to whisky and soda, and the high Victorian habit of drinking champagne
throughout dinner returned.

Meanwhile the
Second Empire declared war on Prussia, MacMahon's army was routed at Sedan, and
the Republic was proclaimed. Scientific investigation of phylloxera,
unsurprisingly, slowed down, although Professor Signoret reported to a fellow
scientist in a balloon-born letter from the siege of Paris that "though he
himself was reduced to eating cats, dogs, and horseflesh, the phylloxera, which
he had in boxes, kept well and in good health".

It took a long
time to establish the cause and the cure. In Tuscany the "laying of long lines
of iron through the soil" - the railways - were blamed, and several miles of
track were torn up. The alarmed authorities in Florence urged the Church to
suggest the wrath of God for mankind's sins as a preferable explanation.

Early remedies
were equally fanciful. Cows' urine, powdered tobacco, walnut leaves, crushed
bones dissolved in sulphuric aid, a cocktail of whale oil and petrol, hot
sealing wax applied to pruning lesions, potassium sulphide dissolved in human
urine, volcanic ash from Pompeii, marching bands, douches of elder-leaf tea,
were all proposed to the Ministry of Agriculture, who had offered a prize of
300,000 gold francs for a cure. The prize still sits unawarded in the vaults of
the Banque de France.

The solution
lay in the cause. American root-stock, which had harboured the disease, was also
resistant to it. Alas, the prejudice against American wine slowed down the cure.
A correspondent in Le Temps wrote in 1878, after half-a-dozen tastings of
American wines, "not one of those who took part had the courage to empty his
glass". The editor proclaimed "any recourse to America should be forsworn until,
should it come, the very day of defeat". It was not until the 1890s that
large-scale replanting of French vineyards, grafting on the Texan St. George
rootstock, began in earnest.

Now, of course,
it is only the fortunate rich who ever taste pre-phylloxera French wine. Should
you be lucky enough to be offered a glass of 1863 Latour, you will, according to
the slightly corked prose of the Wine Spectator, enjoy "the texture of finest
silk, with the aromas and flavour of tobacco, cigar box, leather, berries, plums
and wet earth". A cheaper alternative to this $4,600 glass is provided by the
admirable wines of Chile, which escaped the contagion entirely and now proudly
advertise the fact.

There are two
postscripts to Christy Campbell's astonishing, thoroughly researched and
well-written story. The first is that by the turn of the century French wine
production had outstripped consumption due to imports from Algeria, Italy and
Spain, and wine made in France from raisins and beet sugar. The collapse in
prices that followed in 1906 produced a tax strike, a marching song La
Vigneronne, a Committee of Public Safety for the Defence of Viticulture, and
riots in Narbonne in which six demonstrators were killed.

More recent and
more ominous is the attempt in the 1960s by the viticulturists of the University
of California to replace the St. George with the ominously named AxR1 rootstock.
AxR1 performed wonderfully for a while, and was then attacked by phylloxera.
Satellite and DNA technology helped to track the spread of infection, and
Californian vineyards had to replant at an estimated cost of between half a
billion and a billion dollars.

So when you
drink your next glass of French wine, toast the heroes of the French Resistance
to phylloxera vastatrix so elegantly celebrated in this book. And pray that the
current experiments introducing DNA from the snowdrop into vine rootstocks don't
uncork another vastatrix from the GM genie's bottle.

Christopher
Bland is a viticulturist and Chairman of British Telecom.

The dreaded
dry-leaf devastator(Filed: 14/03/2004)

Hugh
Massingberd reviews Phylloxera by Christy Campbell

Touring the
vineyards of the lower Rhône valley in the South of France, and admiring their
well-ordered air of tamed nature, one would never have guessed that this was
once a scene of devastation. But in the mid-1860s, vines around Roquemaure began
to wither and die; by the end of the 19th century, as the plague spread across
Europe, almost the whole of France was "phylloxerated". This word has a zesty
ring to it, reminiscent of the Irish expression "banjaxed", although the
microscopic yellow insect to which it alludes, a tiny aphid named Phylloxera
vastatrix ("the dry-leaf devastator") was no laughing matter.

Yet such are
Christy Campbell's superb story-telling skills that, notwithstanding my woeful
ignorance of science, botany and viticulture, I found myself utterly hooked on
this fascinating piece of social history which throws light on the clash between
the Old World and the New. For it was from America that both the cause of this
ecological disaster, which threatened to destroy the French wine industry, and
the cure came.

Eventually, it
was established that the parasite had been accidentally imported from an
American vine delivered to a wine merchant in Roquemaure in 1862. The solution,
reached after decades of debate, was finally found to be the grafting of
phylloxera-resistant American rootstock on to local vines. What could have been
as dry as the dust into which the phylloxera turned the vines is rendered
readable by Campbell's keen eye for character and diverting detail.

The star of the
show is Jules-Emile Planchon, a botanist from Montpellier who had trained under
Sir William Hooker at Kew. It was Planchon who spotted clumps of yellowish
insects feasting on the roots of a still "healthy" vine. After some
high-spirited boys, on guard duty at a vineyard, reported that they had seen
"the insects strolling along like good bourgeois going into a restaurant with
walking sticks in their hands", hysteria spread. How could the mysterious aphid,
with its mind-bogglingly complex sex life, be stopped?

Bizarre
suggestions were put forward ranging from Lourdes holy water, lard, herb tea,
toads and tarweed to snail slime, jelly fish, whale oil and volcano ash from
Pompeii. Marching bands, it was proposed, would drum the aphids out of their
underground fastness. Carbon bisulphide, a volatile chemical used as an
industrial solvent and to vulcanise rubber, was poured liberally into trenches
dug around infected vine-footings. The aphids died, but so did half the vines.

Much faith was
placed in the powers of urine, whether bovine, equine or human, dried or, as it
were, fresh. In the Beaujolais, schoolboys were taken twice daily from their
classes to urinate over vines. But while the French were happy to water the
vineyards with the contents of the pissoir, they were less ready to drink the
stuff. The first fruits of the transplanted American vines, supposedly coming to
the rescue like the US Cavalry, were politely described as having "le goût de
renard", and more earthily as "pissat de renard".

The champions
of chemical insecticides ("les sulfuristes") battled against "les americaines",
who had shown that the roots of certain American vines were unpalatable to the
imported insect, until grafting proved "the magic bullet". As Campbell
concludes, "grafting beat the aphid and ran the taste of fox to earth".

The obsessive
Léo Laliman from Bordeaux, "the Attila of France's vines", claimed the credit,
but as the Duchesse de Fitz-James pithily put it: "This innovator, the hero and
at the same time the villain of the story, was so proud of having imported the
American vines that he could never accuse himself of having paid the travel
expenses of the phylloxera that travelled with them on the roots."

An eloquent
memorial to another player in the saga, the viticulturist Gustave Foëx, at the
Montpellier School of Agriculture, sums it all up in a characteristically
sensual French manner. In the allegorical sculpture, a naked, nubile young
americaine tenderly embraces a maturer female form representing France's
noble, embattled vines. But, as Campbell argues in a stimulating postscript,
this is no time for complacency. New strains of phylloxera are at large and the
arguments over taste and genetic engineering rage on.

THE
extraordinary modern-day influence of Robert Parker, an American, (see
article)
over the fate of the French wine industry might seem blasphemous and alien to
traditionalists. But, as Christy Campbell's book on phylloxera
illustrates, French wine and the United States go back a long way. In the 19th
century, alien imports from America almost destroyed—and then saved—French wine
for the world.

The
phylloxera parasite came close to wiping the French wine industry off the
map. It first appeared in the Rhône valley in the 1860s and rapidly spread
throughout the wine-growing regions of France, spreading destruction in its
wake. Eventually botanists worked out that the aphid had been accidentally
imported on vines from the United States. For almost 30 years French winegrowers
battled to combat the dastardly bug while wine yields plummeted. Scientists also
slugged it out, as rival schools sought to come up with a cure for phylloxera.
The French government sponsored a valuable prize for anyone who could come up
with a solution—which drew in a predictable wave of quack solutions. Eventually
the real answer was found. Introduce American vines that were resistant to the
bug into French soil. The United States was the source of the problem and the
solution.

The story of
the battle against phylloxera is a complicated one, featuring a cast of
long-forgotten scientists, bureaucrats and winemakers. Mr Campbell has clearly
toiled diligently in the archives and works hard to bring his story alive. Great
figures such as Darwin and Pasteur have walk-on parts and the battle against the
bug is played out against the backdrop of dramatic events like the
Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. The author also indulges in a little
imaginative reconstruction: “Mr Marshall Pinckney Wilder sniffed the cork
contemplatively. The wine-waiter's eyes flickered with alarm.” And so on. For
all Mr Campbell's valiant efforts, however, his book seems unlikely to entrance
the general reader. Those with an interest in the history of wine or botany or
rural France might find it more rewarding, particularly if combined with a
sturdy red.

Letters

May 27th 2004
From The Economist print edition

Root and branch reform

SIR – You
tell us that noble rootstock was re-imported to France from American vineyards
after French vines were ravaged by phylloxera in the late 19th century (“A
battle lost and won”,
May 8th). The Cousiño family, among others, had brought top quality French
rootstock to Chile in the 1880s and this was also used to save the French wine
industry from annihilation. Don't give those Californians
all the credit.

IF YOU have more money than you know what to do with, one good way to get
through it is to buy expensive bottles of wine. Consumers have always known that
the most prestigious and pricey wines are made by the top châteaux of
Bordeaux—names such as Margaux, Lafite and Mouton-Rothschild—which are
sanctified by generations of tradition. In the past 20 years, however, new names
have begun to appear at the top of the Bordeaux price lists, upstarts such as Le
Pin, Valandraud and Gracia. William Echikson's entertaining and opinionated
portrait of the Bordeaux wine industry explains how this has happened.

His book, “Noble Rot”, succeeds on several levels. It is highly informative: a
newcomer to Bordeaux wines seeking to understand the significance of the
winemaker's terms, “right bank” and “left bank”, the “1855 classification”,
garagiste, and so on, will find them explained in a lively and accessible
way. Mr Echikson also has a journalist's eye for the entertaining anecdote and
the telling detail. Finally, the book succeeds in its main goal, which is to
provide a polemical (and doubtless controversial) examination of the nature of
the wine industry in Bordeaux.

Its thesis is summarised by its title. In winemaking the term “noble rot” is
used to describe how white grapes are allowed to rot on the vine as part of the
process of making the highly prized sweet white wines of Sauternes. But for Mr
Echikson it is also a description of the social and winemaking traditions of
Bordeaux. His argument, in essence, is that the most famous chateaux of
Bordeaux, based mainly on the left bank of the Gironde river, are often
complacent and snobbish traditionalists who trade off their names. By contrast,
a new group of producers, based on the right bank, is now making wines that are
often superior to those of the left bank. These garagistes—so named
because they often work out of a garage—have succeeded by dint of hard work and
an openness to innovation.

At times the book's characters are a little too obviously typecast as “goodies”
or “baddies”. The goodies are working-class Frenchmen who live on the right bank
and whose cause is promoted by democratic Americans, who can see through the
mystique of old Europe. (The book has a distinctly post-September 11th feel.)
The baddies are the snobs of the left bank, in alliance with lazy and corrupt
British wine critics. The chief goodie is Robert Parker, an American wine critic
who has promoted many garagistes. “Noble Rot” does a fine job of
examining the Parker phenomenon and showing how a single critic has developed
such extraordinary influence. But at times Mr Echikson's portrait of Mr Parker
slides into hagiography. He writes, “Like the garagistes, Parker isn't
overwhelmed by tradition partly because he came from an ordinary middle-class
family. He studied at public schools. He rode bicycles. He played sports.”
Perhaps so. But even snobbish aristos have been known to ride bicycles; and
“playing sports” is not necessarily proof of good character.

Still, while Mr Echikson does not disguise his likes and dislikes, he is also
too honest a reporter to leave out difficult facts and dissenting opinions. He
gives a full account of the controversy over the great Mr Parker's alleged
conflicts of interest. More interestingly, he also airs the opinions of those
who believe that Mr Parker's influence has been destructive rather than
liberating. One such is Jean-Pierre Moueix, who as owner of Château Petrus, the
most highly prized wine on the right bank, might be expected to be sympathetic
to Mr Parker and the garagistes. Not so. The boss of Petrus fears that Mr
Parker is discouraging finesse and refinement in favour of wines that are so
powerful and alcoholic that they are more black than red. “He wants to lead us
down a path to destruction,” says Mr Moueix mournfully. Fortunately, both
Bordeaux and the world of wine are big enough to include fans of the
Parker-school such as Mr Echikson as well as traditionalists like Mr Moueix and
the aristos of the left bank. Wine
appreciation, after all, is a matter of taste.

nature.com

the world’s best science on your desktop

Wednesday 17 March 2004

Vol 428 No 6978 pp1-104

Rooting out the wine plague

JEFFREY GRANETT reviews Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the World by Christy
Campbell

Grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira
vitifoliae Fitch) is an aphid-like insect native to North America that
devastated European viticulture in the nineteenth century. On native American
grapevines, the insect initiates galls on expanding vine leaves and immature
roots, doing little harm to the plants' overall fitness. But when it finds
itself on European vines (Vitis vinifera), its populations develop on mature
storage roots, disrupting their function and introducing myriad secondary fungal
pathogens, ultimately killing the vines. When the insect first arrived in France
in the mid-nineteenth century, the damage it caused could not be attributed to
it because it was essentially invisible, as it lived and fed below ground. This
was the last place a grape grower of the time would look for a cause of symptoms
observed above ground. In addition, phylloxera are tiny (less than a millimetre
in length) and populations vanish on dying vines. Once the cause of the problem
was discovered, there was no apparent solution. A large cash prize was offered
for a cure and many off-the-wall ideas were tested, but the prize was never
awarded. Removing and burning infested vines did not slow the spread. Carbon
bisulphide fumigation of infested vines helped, but was not economically viable
in the long term. The vineyards were eventually saved by using phylloxera-resistant native American vines, not as direct
fruit producers (the taste of wine from American grape species was
unacceptable), but as rootstocks. The technology for this was optimized for
vineyard locations and soil types, and has been amazingly successful ever since.
This story is dramatized in Phylloxera: How
Wine was Saved for the World from the perspective
of a wine lover. Christy Campbell focuses on how the people involved both in
Europe and the United States went about solving the phylloxera problem. Science
was clearly important, but so were the feelings and biases of the scientists and
social progressives, the
traditionalist wine growers, those out to make money, and the wine lovers,
including some who held positions of authority. In this context, the role of the
scientists was not only to devise methods and test ideas, but to convince the
rest of the stakeholders of the need for particular points of view and courses
of action. Campbell tells how the key scientific players — Leó Laliman, Jules-Émile
Planchon, Louis Vialla and others — played the role of propagandists, sometimes
successfully, sometimes not. Their's was a science that clearly required
subjective as well as objective thought. This approach to the phylloxera story
is as important for the scientist to understand as it is for the layman. We must
realize that even the most objective applied research is rarely convincing
enough to find immediate utility without a lot of subjective interpretation,
value judgements and soul searching. Campbell exemplifies this conflict with a
lengthy description of the difficulties that the scientists faced in gaining
acceptance of American vines as the solution to the phylloxera problem. American
vines brought phylloxera to France in the first place, so how could their use be
encouraged without increasing the risk of further phylloxera infestations and
possibly opening up French viticulture to new, yet undiscovered scourges? How
could the unacceptable 'foxy' taste of the American grapes not find its way into
French wine, even if the American vines were used only as rootstocks? How can a
noble French wine be truly noble and French if it owes a debt to wild,
uncivilized American grapes? The definitive answers to these questions had to
wait until the rootstocks had been in the ground and producing wine for a decade
or more. The first users of the rootstock technology did not have enough facts —
they needed to be convinced by the propaganda. The story as told by Campbell has
a colourful array of heroes and charlatans, and is neither completely linear nor
holistic — but nor was the phylloxera problem caused or solved completely from
the top down or bottom up. But it is an exciting, compelling tale. Campbell's
short description of possible uses for genetic engineering in his concluding
section make it clear that such stories are not over even after you put the book
down. For English readers who would like more information, George Ordish's The
Great Wine Blight provides more science, as do viticultural histories such as
Harry Paul's Science, Vine, and Wine in Modern France (reviewed in Nature 387,
670–671; 1997). Campbell's book is a fairly easy read, although the timeline
gets a bit tangled occasionally. Its focus is on people solving a problem, but
it provides enough science for the general reader to understand the
controversies and the logic of the eventual outcome. Phylloxera ravaged Europe's
vines until the use of American rootstocks led to French resistance.

Book Review: Phylloxera: How Wine Was Saved for the WorldBy James SullivanPublished: March 11 2004

Book Review: Phylloxera: How Wine Was Saved for the
World
by Christy Campbell
HarperCollins £ 17.99, 314 pages

There is an elaborate marble monument opposite the railway
station in the French town of Montpellier, at the hub of one of France's
greatest wine-producing areas. The inscription on this memorial to Jules-Emile
Planchon, a scientist whose pioneering work helped to solve the problem of a
plague that swept Europe's wine-growing areas in the second half of the 19th
century, reads: "The American vine rescued the French vine to triumph over the
phylloxera."

Another photograph in Christy Campbell's lively, non-specialist account of the
drama of phylloxera shows a highly sentimental sculpture at La Gaillarde, a
centre for experimental viticulture established more than a century ago. It is
of two female figures: a young and nubile americaine embracing a rather raddled
older woman who represents the ailing vines of France. It's a very peculiar and
unsettling image.

Phylloxera are minuscule yellow aphid-like creatures that infest the roots of
vines and kill them relentlessly.

In the 1860s and 1870s the infestation swept the continent from Portugal to the
Crimea, threatening the very existence of the great wines of Europe, as well as
the livelihood of countless small farmers and peasants. The issue was so grave,
particularly in France, that the government offered a huge reward to anyone who
could solve the problem.

Christy Campbell recounts the story of the scientists, horticulturalists,
politicians, growers and wine experts who pitted themselves against the
impending destruction of a way of life. The solution was discovered in the US,
where certain New World vines were found to be naturally resistant to phylloxera.
French vineyards were grubbed up by the hundred, but the early crops from the
American roots were pronounced "undrinkable". Grafting the traditional strains
on to imported roots turned out to be the answer - and the method is used to
this day.

Ironically, the dreadful insects had been inadvertently introduced to Europe
from the US in the first place. Research was so detailed that we even know the
very plot, a wineseller's backyard in the little town of Roquemaure in the Gard,
where the offending imports were planted in 1865.

This story of an early eco-disaster, and its solution, makes fascinating
reading. Phylloxera still haunts the whole wine-growing world (California's Napa
Valley has seen recent outbreaks), and it is tempting to read some geo-political
metaphor into the notion that the noble French wines are grown only by being
grafted on to hardy, disease-proof American rootstock.

But we should resist that fanciful notion: this is botany, pure and simple.

Wine is so fantastic, it even gets you drunk. But there was a time when it
looked as though it was going to become a memory for everyone except, perhaps,
the super-rich. This book has as its epigraph one of the most chilling moments
from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four : "'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a
faint smile. 'You will have read about it in books, no doubt.'"

The cause of wine's almost total disappearance (not in Orwell's book, but in the
real world) was a vile-looking little insect, imported from America, which
sucked at the roots of unresisting French vines until they died, at which point
the murderous mite moved on to healthier stock.

It took a while for French vignerons to work out what was going on. You can't
really see Phylloxera - and certainly not the eggs - without a good magnifying
glass. And when you are dealing with peasants whose first language isn't even
French (in many wine-producing regions, even in the late 19th century, it was
Occitan), then other causes, attributable more to superstition than science,
become plausible. In the Bordelais, labourers would "make crosses of hazel
branches, bound by wicker and garlanded with flowers, to be blessed by priests
on the first Sunday of May and planted in the awakening vineyards to ward off
the evil. The Catholic church would grow alarmed as peasants invoked an older
'religion' of animist naturalism to spare them from the plague."

You may feel you know just about enough regarding Phylloxera to get by on. Bug
eats vines, vines are grafted on to American rootstock, vines recover. Some
mystery lingers as to whether pre-Phylloxera wine tasted any different, but on
the whole this is a theoretical debate - and anyway, you drink Wolf Blass's
excellent Cabernet-Shiraz on offer at a fiver a bottle from Majestic, so who
really cares?

This is not an attitude you should be particularly proud of. (For a start, not
even Australia escaped Phylloxera.) Christy Campbell has written a story of
scientific endeavour, courage and intransigence. In the case of French vintners,
we are dealing with one of the most tenacious kinds of intransigence you can
possibly imagine. Add as a background the fact that Darwin's ideas on natural
selection - of which the march, and retreat, of Phylloxera were to provide
textbook illustrations - had received an extremely chilly reception in France.
As had American wines, which received zero points in blind tastings and the
puzzlingly uniform description, intended as an insult, "foxy". Chauvinism may
not have been the only force at work, though - the American vine, which had
evolved since the separation of the land masses of Europe and the Americas,
produced grapes that only the most eccentric, or tolerant, or thirsty would want
to turn into wine. But by the time Phylloxera had nearly reduced French vines to
extinction, that was all you could get (it was called "the wine of the
resistance, the wine of the anarchists, the wine that drives you mad", and it
was in fact revived in 1993 by some enthusiasts in the Ardèche). But by that
stage people were desperately turning alcohol from grape must, beetroot, sugar -
almost anything, really - into "wine" by adding all sorts of unsavoury
ingredients. (Campbell does not mention that the rise of absinthe was one of
Phylloxera's knock-on effects, but I believe it was.)

Campbell is perhaps a tiny bit severe on those who resisted the only viable
solution - the grafting of European vines on to American rootstock. After all,
they were worried the taste would be affected, a rather important consideration,
and it was the American plant which had contaminated the soil in the first
place. But it proved to be the only answer - and Campbell should be credited for
telling what could have been an abstruse and specialised story in such a
readable fashion.

Incidentally, if you want to find out what wine from ungrafted French rootstock
tastes like, you still have a couple of options. One is Bollinger's "Vieilles
Vignes Françaises", and the other is much cheaper. But I won't tell you what it
is here. You're going to have to get the book. This may strike you as mean of
me, but Mr Campbell deserves some reward.